Wednesday, December 20, 2006

"An Interesting Construct"

Bush, who has always said that the United States is headed for victory in Iraq, conceded yesterday what Gates, Powell and most Americans in polls have already concluded. "An interesting construct that General Pace uses is: We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush said, referring to Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs chairman, who was spotted near the Oval Office before the interview. "There's been some very positive developments. . . . [But] obviously the real problem we face is the sectarian violence that needs to be dealt with."

Asked yesterday about his "absolutely, we're winning" comment at an Oct. 24 news conference, the president recast it as a prediction rather than an assessment. "Yes, that was an indication of my belief we're going to win," he said.

If a President Clinton, Gore, or Kerry parsed verb tenses similarly almost four years into a war, what would be the reaction from the Titular Right?

As callous and supportive of the President as it sounds, I'm beginning to think we've got to stick this thing out. I was against the war during the build up and the day the first bombs dropped, but a great many Americans supported it, even argued on its behalf, including most of our representatives in congress. Nearly everyone seemed content to sit back and let it happen.

To assure that this big of a screw up doesn't happen for at least another hundred years, we should clean up the mess that we collectively created. If it means increasing taxes, so be it. If it means instituting the draft, do it. If it means turning to the UN with our hat in our hands, let’s get started.

Put a half-million troops on the ground and send the bloody private contractors packing.

Even those of us who didn't vote for Bush, or support the war, have to admit that American hubris is one of its primary causes. And don’t we all contribute to the hubris in one way or another? We can’t just peel the “W” stickers of our SUVs and wipe our hands of the unbelievable misery we’ve created for the Iraqi people. Perhaps if we actually see this thing through to the end, we'll be less likely to let something as stupid, thoughtless, and reckless ever happen again.

anonymous said: but a great many Americans supported it, even argued on its behalf, including most of our representatives in congress.

Yes, technically that is true. It would be more correct to say "Virtually all Republicans but only a minority of Democrats in congress supported it. I stress this because the people responsible for the Iraq fiasco want to bury this fact.

Clinton and/or Gore would never speak in this way. (But hey, during the Clinton/Gore years the Titular Right was far too busy getting all worked up over Clinton's sex life and Gore's earth-toned clothing.) Bush Sr. would never speak in this way. In fact, I can't think of anyone other than W. who would make such a huge mess and then refuse to face up to it. Again and again I ask myself why so many of my fellow Americans voted for the guy. At this point, it's a rhetorical question.

"...The US military went on to build military bases in Hungary, Bosnia, Albania and Macedonia, in addition to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, then still legally part of Yugoslavia.One of the most important and least mentioned new US bases was in Bulgaria, a former Soviet satellite and new NATO member. Bezmer Air Base in Bulgaria had ideal proximity to Iran and potential hot spots in the Middle East and Central Asia. In a conflict, the military would use it to ‘surge’ men and materiel toward the front lines...

During a December 2004 visit to Kabul, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finalized plans to build nine additional new bases in Afghanistan, in the provinces of Helmand, Herat, Nimrouz, Balkh, Khost and Paktia. That was in addition to three major US military bases built in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 2001-2002, at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul, the US’ main military logistics center; Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan and Shindand Air Field in the western province of Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan, was built some 100 kilometers from the border with Iran. Teheran stood up and took note...

At that same time, the Pentagon came to an agreement with the government of Kyrgystan in Central Asia, to build a strategically important base there, Manas Air Base at Bishkek’s international airport. Manas was not only near to Afghanistan; it was also in easy striking distance to Caspian Sea oil and gas resources, as well as to the borders of both China and Russia...

By 2006 the US had constructed 14 of those permanent bases in Iraq— a country only twice the size of the state of Idaho. That made a mockery of Presidential pledges to plan a US troop withdrawal.

Far the most significant Iraqi base was Balad Air Base and Camp Anaconda, just north of Baghdad. It accommodated both Air Force fighters and transport aircraft. Camp Anaconda, adjacent to the air base, served as a main base and logistics center for US troops in central Iraq. Military analysts noted that Balad was perfectly positioned to project US power throughout the Middle East...

Internal US indebtedness had reached unprecedented levels by 2006. Chronic, huge deficits in trade with the rest of the world, the outsourcing of millions of high-skilled jobs to cheaper locations from India to Romania, all were clear enough signs...

Some influential members of the Washington power establishment had concluded that a drastic decline in future American economic and political influence could only be arrested, if at all, by a radical redeployment of the second pillar of its postwar imperium, its overwhelming global military power..."[engdahl/a century of war]

Washington policy in the Post-Cold War era after 1991 had been defined by the British father of geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder. Washington policy strategists, though they rarely mentioned his name anymore, had studied the British geographer thoroughly, just as had Putin and the Russian political elites. Mackinder’s famous dictum issued to the British and US negotiators at the 1918 Versailles peace talks following Warld War I were still the strategic roadmap for AngloAmerican policy a century later. At that time, Mackinder had laid out three axioms of world political power:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;Who rules the World-Island commands the world.

Mackinder's Heartland was the Central Asia core of Eurasia, and the World-Island was all of Eurasia, including Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

For Mackinder, Great Britain, never a part of Continental Europe, would remain a separate naval or sea-power. For Mackinder, an ardent Empire advocate, the implicit axiom for continued hegemony of the British Empire following the 1914-1917 World War, was to prevent at all costs a convergence of interests between the nations of East Europe--which for him included not only Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary but Austria-Hungary--with the Russia-centered Eurasia ‘Heartland’ or ‘pivot’ land as he sometimes termed it. He warned in 1904 that the advent of the modern railway made possible for the first time the economic union of the Heartland and East Europe to threaten the future of the British Empire.

The Mackinder geopolitical perspective had shaped Britain’s entry into the 1914 Great War; it shaped her entry into World War Two; it later shaped Churchill’s calculated provocations of an increasingly paranoid Stalin, beginning 1943, into what became the Cold War. That Cold War, based on the doctrine of Containment formulated by George F. Kennan in 1948, was in many respects about keeping Western Europe and East Asia and Japan in a permanent state of hostility with a Russia-centered Soviet Union to the ultimate Anglo-American advantage.

For more than a century, Anglo and later Anglo-American grand strategy had been about preventing the ‘Heartland from commanding the World Island.’ A look at a polar projection map of US military alliances during the Cold War made the point: The Soviet Union had been geopolitically contained and prevented from any significant linkup with Western Europe or the Middle East or Asia. The Cold War was about Russian efforts to circumvent that NATO-centered Iron Curtain.

What was only to become clear around the 2003 Iraq war and related geopolitical events in and around the Heartland, was that Washington had never lost sight of Mackinder’s geopolitics, despite the apparent collapse of the Soviet Union as a military threat...[engdahl]